nytimes.com
 May 22, 2014
The End for Long Island College Hospital By Anemona Hartocollis 5-6
minutes

Evelyn Valdez, an intensive care nurse at Long Island College Hospital,
had already been asked to turn in her identity card. She was taking
photos on her tablet on Thursday, to remember the place where she had
worked for nearly 30 years and which she called her “second home.”

It was becoming obvious to Ms. Valdez that the money-losing hospital
in Brooklyn, 156 years old, would be closing as scheduled, at least in
its current form, after 16 months of legal skirmishing and political
protests to keep it open.

“We had the impression that it will be a full hospital and then
suddenly, we were told it will be an urgent care and we have to go,”
she said.

A few blocks away, Justice Johnny Lee Baynes of State Supreme Court
had just approved a settlement that allowed the hospital to close at
midnight on Thursday, except for the emergency department, while the
state university system, which owns the hospital, negotiates a sale to
a real estate developer, the Peebles Corporation.

The rest of the hospital, including the intensive care unit, was to close
down. The four remaining patients were sent home or to other hospitals
and almost all employees were laid off, state officials said.

Dazed nurses, doctors and community members filled the courtroom as
the settlement was announced. They were once steadfastly opposed to the
idea of shrinking LICH, as the hospital is called, to no more than an
emergency room, which some derided as a glorified urgent care center. Now
they were reluctantly caving.

“This is not what we fought for, to end up with urgent care,” Julie
Semente, a nurse at the hospital for about 30 years, said.

The comparison was not completely accurate: The emergency room will be
able to take patients brought there by ambulance, whereas the typical
urgent care clinic does not. But ambulances could not bring in “advanced
life support” cases, like heart attack and gunshot patients. State
university officials confirmed this.

In a 70-30 joint venture, Peebles and the Witkoff Group, an investment
firm, have proposed to pay the State University of New York $260 million
for the property in Cobble Hill, a brownstone neighborhood with harbor
views.

Community groups and hospital employees had wanted LICH preserved as a
full-service hospital, and the company that submitted the highest-ranked
bid, Brooklyn Health Partners, pledged to keep it as such. But when it
could not put forward a viable proposal to run the hospital, SUNY moved
onto Peebles, the second-ranked bidder, which proposes to lease some of
the property for medical uses, including an emergency room to be run by
the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, a chemotherapy clinic
and a clinic for the poor, possibly to be located off-site in nearby
Red Hook.

As for the rest of the property, the proposal calls for market-rate
housing but says Peebles is open to negotiations for some affordable
housing. Peebles has also proposed providing $7.5 million to help
employees find new jobs.

Jim Walden, a lawyer who represented community groups, doctors and
Mayor Bill de Blasio when he was the city’s public advocate, said the
surrounding neighborhood liked Peebles’s housing proposal because it
had proposed to build within existing zoning, though the terms could
change. The Brooklyn Health Partners’ bid included the possibility
of new, tall apartment buildings, which, neighbors worried, could dwarf
the blocks below.

The settlement says that if Peebles buys the hospital, it will cooperate
with the community in carrying out a study of health care needs, and
then change its plan to fit the findings if they are “reasonable”
and “feasible.”

Mr. Walden said that the study could introduce a hospital into the picture
again, but that if it did not, the community would live with that verdict.

Justice Baynes was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping the
hospital open as Mr. Walden and others filed lawsuit after lawsuit against
SUNY, which said LICH was draining money from the rest of the university
system. Peebles will start paying for the emergency room on Friday.

On Thursday, the judge struck a philosophical note: “What side was
right and what side was wrong, I think the future is going to bear out,
in terms of the status of health care” in Brooklyn.

Justice Baynes noted that it was not clear that the real estate deal
with Peebles would go through.

“This could go bad,” he said. “I believe it will not. I am thinking
positive.”